Triangle threading salons balance community’s beauty needs with pandemic safety

The eyes are the windows to the soul. But for 48-year-old Pirya Matai, eyebrows are everything.

Last spring, when the pandemic first swept through the country, shutting down businesses and restricting close contact, Matai stopped visiting Mina’s Brows & Spa, a beauty salon in Morrisville.

Matai had been getting her eyebrows threaded every two to three weeks since she was a teenager, so when salons started reopening late last summer, she was eager to return to her routine.

“As soon as they could take people, I was first in line,” she said.

Threading is an ancient hair-removal practice with origins in South Asia and the Middle East. It’s used most often to shape brows.

It’s an intimate practice. The beautician unravels a cotton spool, holding one part of the thread firmly between her teeth and the other wrapped tightly around her fingers, as she positions the string in a triangle.

The customer, leaning back in a salon chair, will patiently stretch their skin taut as the beautician pulls the string back with her neck and fingers in quick, rhythmic motions to remove tiny hairs from the root.

The whole process takes minutes, all within inches of the face.

But now, as COVID-19 has forced a reevaluation of risks and the threat of new variants grows, the future of threading businesses and the community found inside them remains unclear.

A rite of passage

Growing up, Matai was more familiar with waxing than threading. Then, at 17, she stepped into a Jackson Heights salon during a family trip to New York City.

In the 1990s, the Queens neighborhood — home to a thriving community of immigrants from South Asian countries — was far different from Raleigh, where South Asian beauty parlors were still rare.

It didn’t take long for Matai to get hooked on threading.

“I became addicted,” she said.

Now in 2021, drive through any strip mall in Cary or Morrisville with an Indian grocery store and you’ll likely find a South Asian-run beauty salon close by.

Pre-pandemic, customers would filter in and out, sitting beneath framed handwritten notes from local beauty queens and signs proclaiming “Best brows in the Triangle!” as Bollywood music played overhead.

Many of these salons started as small businesses that South Asian women ran out of their own homes.

“Most people thread at home, either the moms, they learn from their moms or aunts or somebody in the family,” Matai said. “But most of the girls, there’s a lot of women in our community who just thread at home, just pick up the thread and do it themselves.”

For many South Asian women, threading is a mixed bag of cultural nuances. On one hand, it’s a cost- effective and hygienic way to remove hairs, causing less skin irritation than waxing and usually priced under just $10.

But it can also reflect the insecurities of trying to fit into Eurocentric beauty standards that don’t account for thick, dark hair. Going to a salon in middle school is a common experience, especially as puberty brings on new hair growth.

“It’s a rite of passage,” Neha Prasad, 19, said during a visit to Chandni’s Spa & Brows in Morrisville.

Prasad stopped into the salon with her mother, Anjana, in July. Before March 2020, they used to go to a salon every two weeks. But Neha has since become more self-reliant, tweezing unwanted hairs when threading wasn’t an option.

“Since the pandemic was a thing, now I’m like, ‘OK, I don’t need to go get my eyebrows done,’” Neha said.

When she can go, though, she says she feels a definite difference.

For Matai, it’s not just that threading offers a precise look. It’s that extra boost of confidence, like a new haircut or dye job, that makes her feel beautiful.

“The minute that you walk out of the salon and you have freshly threaded brows, or a freshly threaded face, you just feel more confident,” Matai said. “You feel cleaner, you look good, you feel good.”

‘It’s part of my being,” she said, laughing.

Business challenges

Shilpa Bhalodia started Chandni’s Spa & Brows out of her basement in Cary 30 years ago. She now has four locations in Cary, Durham, Raleigh and Morrisville. The threading service is so popular that two of her salons are dedicated solely to it.

When Gov. Roy Cooper closed personal-care businesses to help fight the coronavirus, Bhalodia received message after message from clients asking when they could regain their shapely brows — one of a few parts of the face still visible with a mask.

“We work in frontline [jobs]. Can you please, you know, [tell us] when are you going to open?” she recalled hearing from them.

For almost two months, her stores remained closed. And when she reopened in May 2020, there were big changes.

Employees wore face shields, masks and gloves, even while grasping the delicate, cotton thread. They took temperatures and sanitized surfaces between clients. Bhalodia also implemented a new threading style to put more physical space between customers and employees.

Sofia Rajaram runs M&S Spa and Salon, with stores in Cary and Jacksonville, N.C.

Retaining employees has been hard, she said. Before the pandemic, she had 26 employees across three locations. Now, she has just six.

Rajaram also had to shutter her newest location in Morrisville, which she’d opened right before the pandemic hit.

Though she feels more reassured since getting vaccinated, Rajaram had concerns when she reopened last summer, mostly about catching the virus from a customer and infecting her children.

“That was a big fear,” she said. “But I cannot — I don’t have that much of luxury to sit back and relax and say, ‘Hey, I don’t want to work,’ you know?”

As the delta variant surges through North Carolina, Rajaram has noticed customers getting nervous again.

“If in case there is another close down or anything like that happens, I don’t know if I can survive,” she said.

Community and connection

Still, Rajaram says she loves what she does. Her salon isn’t just a place for clients to get their eyebrows threaded, or to try out a sleek, new haircut.

Often, people will end up chatting about their lives, or even ask her for advice. Rajaram said she’s been able to direct women to local organizations like Kiran, a domestic violence and crisis counseling agency that serves South Asians across the state.

“(The salon is) just a fun place at times, and sometimes it’s a therapy place, too,” she said.

Though many Triangle threading businesses are run by South Asians, both Bhalodia and Rajaram say their customers range in age, ethnicity and gender.

Sean Wiles, 19, has been getting his eyebrows cleaned up at Chandni’s for three years. During the pandemic, his mom had been tweezing his brows, which he called “torture.” He returned to the salon in July.

“I think it makes a huge difference, lowkey,” Wiles said. “My eyebrows used to be super bushy.”

“I tell everybody, ‘You gotta come here; this place is dope.’”

The relationship between beautician and client is a trusted one at these salons. Bhalodia said her employees have regulars who only want to be threaded by one person.

Matai has developed a unique relationship with her own threading person, who has watched her go from being a single young adult to the mother of a preteen.

“They know about your life; you know about their life,” Matai said. “You’ve seen their children grow. You’ve seen them through different phases of life.”

Going back to the salon now during an era of social distancing and constant caution, Matai says she misses the kinship of a typical threading visit. Still, she doesn’t see these as being permanent changes.

“(Threading is) not something that’s going to ever cease,” she said. “It’s been there, it’s going to continue to be there. It’s just a part of life”

Maydha Devarajan was a 2021 summer intern at The News & Observer, supported by the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund at the North Carolina Community Foundation.

This story was originally published September 2, 2021 at 5:45 AM.